Users will get several warnings before things start to break.

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The "six strikes" anti-piracy program is on its way, for real. Jill Lesser, head of the Center for Copyright Information—the enforcement agency in charge of the system—confirmed that the system is coming this year in a September interview with Ars. Speaking at a New York Internet conference, representatives of two of the biggest ISPs, Verizon and Time Warner, have finally described how their systems will work.

Despite the "six strikes" moniker, both Verizon and Time Warner talked about systems that work in three essential phases. First comes the "notice" phase, which simply involves letting users know they've been tracked on copyright-infringing sites. Verizon customers, for example, will send notifications to primary account holders via both e-mail and telephone. "We send a notice to the customer, saying there's been an allegation [of] illegal activity with copyrighted files," said Verizon VP Link Hoewing.

Next is the "acknowledgement" phase. This is when the customer will have to actually acknowledge having received those notices. Hoewing said his company's customers will experience this as a pop-up window. The idea here is to make extra sure they're getting to the right people. In a house or apartment with a shared Internet connection, he noted, five people may be using the same account, with just one person—likely not the account holder—engaged in copyright infringement.

Finally, there's the "mitigation" phase. This is when users who have traded copyrighted files are actually punished, and Time Warner and Verizon take different tacks here. Verizon users will have their speeds throttled for between two and three days, said Hoewing. And even then, they'll have the right to appeal the case, which will be handled by an independent arbitration firm, he said. (The user will have to pay a $35 filing fee for the appeal.) Before the speed reduction begins, subscribers will be given a 14-day advance notice.

Time Warner users will see popular websites blocked. "We're constructing a soft landing area, where the customer is restricted in the type of browsing that they can do," said Time Warner VP Fernando Laguarda. "If they appeal, all those measures are suspended pending the appeal."

The target of "six strikes" is the casual copyright infringer, not dedicated pirates. At one point, moderator Declan McCullagh of CNET asked how the content owners and ISPs would deal with customers who might use a system like TOR to hide their identity. "Will this just push determined pirates into a darker area of the Internet?" he asked. "Will you just catch the loser ones, who aren't that smart?"

CCI head Jill Lesser responded that the goal isn't to stop "serial pirates" trying to avoid IP laws. Rather, it's to educate "the vast majority of the people for whom trading in copyrighted material has become a social norm, over many years."

Both the content company participants and the ISPs emphasized that "education" is the goal, rather than lawsuits. "This is not about suing users at all," said Ron Wheeler, a senior VP at Fox Broadcasting who was on the panel. "This system is not designed to produce lawsuits—it's designed to produce education."

Other ISPs may be participating soon. A Cox spokesperson told TorrentFreak, which first reported on the conference, that it was invited to participate but decided not to, for now.

So basically the MPAA hates what technology has to offer in the 21st century. Their solution? Send people back to the 90's!

This will only speed up the next step for the internet:

The death of the ISP. ISPs have been very mediocre in keeping up with advancements in network speed when compared to any other information technology, I won't miss them one bit when something better comes along.

Why should I have to pay $35 to educate them that IP addresses do not equal people, that courts have ruled that I'm not obligated to secure my wifi, and that even if I tried, it cannot be secured, since like every other Linksys router sold in the last 5 years, it has WPS vulnerability that can easily be used to crack it anyway.

Well your internet service is not a human right by any means. They will simply cancel you. There is no law saying that they have to service you.

That's how it always begins, first an innocent little law is passed to creating a foundation to build on, then more laws are built on top of this one morphing it into a complex structure that will slurp as many rights as possible in the name of security, safety, and freedom; when in fact, it's all about the $$$

This isn't about a law being passed.

This six strikes thing is the media/ISP cartels setting up their own self-contained faux-legal system to accuse and punish their own customers. The great part for them is that they get to be the plaintiff, the prosecutor, the judge, AND the jury all at once. They also get to be the appeals court in case you decline to pay their extortion fee the first time around.

When you signed up for that internet connection, you agreed to the terms of service via the service contract. Almost all ISPs have a list of prohibited behavior such as committing illegal crimes with their service.

A couple of things:

1) Those contracts haven't exactly been rigorously tested in court.

2) They don't actually have the right to declare you a "criminal" and cut off your service for something they've simply accused you of. That's what we have a court system for.

3) Downloading a movie is still more of a civil issue than a criminal one, no matter how badly the media cartels want to change that.

How do they know what material is infringing and what isnt. I get that if the download is a bit torrent stream the deep packet inspection can see what type of file it is. What I don't understand is how they differentiate a specific song downloaded from Amazon vs the same song downloaded from a napster like client. Do individual files carry a token or something that says that this particular file is a legally purchased song? Or do they just whitelist certain sites?

How do they know what material is infringing and what isnt. I get that if the download is a bit torrent stream the deep packet inspection can see what type of file it is. What I don't understand is how they differentiate a specific song downloaded from Amazon vs the same song downloaded from a napster like client. Do individual files carry a token or something that says that this particular file is a legally purchased song? Or do they just whitelist certain sites?

From what I've heard, they are not monitoring what you download. A third-party company monitors P2P file-sharing (e.g., torrent streams of the latest movie or album) and harvests the IP addresses found downloading copyrighted content. They then send this list of addresses to the copyright center the ISPs helped create with the copyright lobby. This center figures out how to route the copyright infringement claims based on the IP blocks owned by each participating ISP. So, it sends a list of IP addresses and what each one downloaded to the ISP who then match the IP address with a subscriber to carry out the enforcement.

This is what you get when you let "the market" work things out on anything more important than iPhones or canned tomatoes. Once real money and power is involved, the consumer is immediately marginalized and denuded of any influence.

From what I've heard, they are not monitoring what you download. A third-party company monitors P2P file-sharing (e.g., torrent streams of the latest movie or album) and harvests the IP addresses found downloading copyrighted content. They then send this list of addresses to the copyright center the ISPs helped create with the copyright lobby. This center figures out how to route the copyright infringement claims based on the IP blocks owned by each participating ISP. So, it sends a list of IP addresses and what each one downloaded to the ISP who then match the IP address with a subscriber to carry out the enforcement.

This is what you get when you let "the market" work things out on anything more important than iPhones or canned tomatoes. Once real money and power is involved, the consumer is immediately marginalized and denuded of any influence.

++ This is my gripe about Obama being ok with the cable companies coming to a "free market solution". Obama was kind of stuck in a bad place, if he asked congress (good luck with GOP controlled congress passing ANYTHING Obama wanted before this election) to do something about it, he would be labeled a socialist or whatever. If he goes with the free market solution, he pisses us liberals off. Hopefully now that Obama won again, maybe we can get something going, if EFF and others stepped up to make this an issue. But I don't see it coming to that anytime soon because right now, we have nothing but monopolies in this country when it comes to internet access, PERIOD. With that not being addressed, we won't ever see real legislation to do something about this kind of shit. To congress's inferior intelligence and reasoning capabilities, they consider cable's competition to be dialup or satellite or DSL at best. That's equivalent to them saying if we don't have 6-lane highways, we can always use the dirt roads to travel to work or move goods around on, you know, because they are all ROADS you know?

krispharper, I am not sure about Verizon, but Time Warner's method uses a cable modem/DNS based solution. It basically redirects all http traffic to an acknowledgement page. Once you click the button or link, it removes the DNS redirection.

I'm on Time Warner, but my router is set up to use OpenDNS, not Time Warner's flaky servers. Does this mean that I won't get notices?

So, the resolution is that all illegal activity will now be conducted over connections which aren't owned by the person conducting the illegal activity. E.G. get your torrent on at the coffee shop.

The flip side of this is that most people actually paying the bills has very little knowledge on how to prevent people from "borrowing" their connection. Heck, I recently had a neighbor on the apartment-provided internet who plugged their provided internet port into the routed side of their wireless. About half the time, my connection was getting picked up by their DHCP instead of the apartment's. The end result was that I was on their local network, completely trusted to poke around in their router as I pleased. I was tempted several times to brick it (upload a random text file into the firmware) when their DHCP crossover was messing up my network. Somebody must have fixed it for them because it eventually disappeared on its own. There was nothing stopping me from spoofing their router to do whatever I pleased, and not because of something that I did, but because of something they did.

This sounds like it wouldn't hold water for a moment in a court of law. I know email -- and I believe even telephony -- are not legally acceptable forms of notification to "legal" actions. Without some sort of confirmation that the person being held legally responsible received the notice, you cannot assume the person received notice. Finally, without proof that the first two steps actually happened, there is little the ISP can do to prevent the "user" from bringing the ISP in front of an actual judge, who probably won't waste time and rule in favor of the user given the ISP's failure to follow its own rules. If you don't follow your own steps for "due process," you don't have the right to dole out vigilante "justice."

One of the problems I have with this is that this is a private system of enforcement dishing out punishment, not a legal court of law. They have been known to render punishment upon accusation, and the burden of proof is on the accused. I also have no idea on how to prove that I DIDN'T download any particular stuff. The fact that they're not excusing people with open or insecure wireless access points isn't good either, as I could get my internet throttled because a war driver is downloading stuff.

Another problem I also have is the "educational" motive behind all of this. In the past, copyright PSAs have been suggesting that fair use is almost non-existent and that I'm not allowed to do anything as much as quote Joe Mullin's article (this article) without his express written consent. Real educational content would bring up fair use, and to what extent your allowed to remake and redistribute someone's work.

Also, NOTHING is original in artistry. Everything is inspired by something, or derived from something. I know we are talking about BitTorrent in this article, but I fear that ISPs don't have to stop there, and are being allowed to act against unauthorized uses of works (think of the takedown issues with YouTube).

So, the resolution is that all illegal activity will now be conducted over connections which aren't owned by the person conducting the illegal activity. E.G. get your torrent on at the coffee shop.

The flip side of this is that most people actually paying the bills has very little knowledge on how to prevent people from "borrowing" their connection. Heck, I recently had a neighbor on the apartment-provided internet who plugged their provided internet port into the routed side of their wireless. About half the time, my connection was getting picked up by their DHCP instead of the apartment's. The end result was that I was on their local network, completely trusted to poke around in their router as I pleased. I was tempted several times to brick it (upload a random text file into the firmware) when their DHCP crossover was messing up my network. Somebody must have fixed it for them because it eventually disappeared on its own. There was nothing stopping me from spoofing their router to do whatever I pleased, and not because of something that I did, but because of something they did.

while it may be comforting and amusing to hold up these sort of situations, it's not like any of it will get a case thrown out of court. if someone sneaks onto your network and gets you into trouble, you're still in for a shitload of hassle (and legal bills).

<quote>CCI head Jill Lesser responded that the goal isn't to stop "serial pirates" trying to avoid IP laws. Rather, it's to educate "the vast majority of the people for whom trading in copyrighted material has become a social norm, over many years."</quote>

You dont get it. Its the entertainment industries that need to be educated not people that engage in copyright infringement.

The world plays by their own rules, especially on the internet. If you dont like it dont produce stuff that people want to share and take yourself to some island, do all the creating you want and nobody will be there to take your stuff.

What a joke this is. If they notify you through DNS routing, and most of us self respecting internet users DONT use the ISP's DNS servers, we won't ever see them. So, what are they going to do if they keep sending DNS notifications and I don't see them? What if they give me 6 strikes through their putrid DNS thingie and I don't "acknowledge" them, will they then cut my internet off? And paying $35 fee? Fuck that, that's when I go straight to a paid VPN and never worry about their pathetic 6 strikes bullshit. I don't do much torrenting (daily show and colbert seem to be the only things I torrent anymore besides ISOs), and I would rather spend $10 a month on a good VPN than go back to inferior cable and pay them an extra $60 a month for 600 channels of utter low IQ shit that I will never watch. The ISP's can go fuck themselves. We have no competition in this "free market", it's a joke. Anyone else says differently is an idiot with nothing to show otherwise. Cable companies have a monopoly, period. DSL is not competition.

Side note, what are the good VPN's you guys use? I don't mind paying for them, would rather they get my money than any of these inferior cocksuckers that support this. Send me the info through PM if you don't want to advert the good ones.

Planned obsolescence my friend. once the notices start going out people that can switch will switch to an ISP that are not enrolled in this program. Nobody wants to be told how to live there life especially if its coming from some corrupt companies that NOBODY can relate to. If anyone wants a recommendation for an ISP in northern California I recommend Sonic.net They have been a trustworthy and reliable ISP since day one. *Disclaimer* I used to work there a long time ago, but do you own research.

And now that Obama has been re-elected, it means DoJ will go nowhere near checking into this "cartel" between the ISP's, that have taken upon themselves to censor websites at will.

lucianarmasu Is 100% right, no matter if you down vote him or not. Biden has ALWAYS said he supports the copyright cartels, he has had secrete meetings with them, ARS reported on them its self!!

But somehow this guy gets down voted? WOW! Anyone that did not look at that post needs to be striped of everything that the sciences has bestowed upon them. They are basically covering there eyes when they dont like what they hear and THAT ALWAYS GOOD FOR SCIENCE! NOT.

HOW the hell did it become a good thing to introduce Orthodoxy (downvoting things you don't like) into a forum about science, thats the type of thing that belongs in a church!

while it may be comforting and amusing to hold up these sort of situations, it's not like any of it will get a case thrown out of court. if someone sneaks onto your network and gets you into trouble, you're still in for a shitload of hassle (and legal bills).

And there's the bigger problem. If an ISP gets their panties in a bundle and decides to take a case to court, then the contents of the defendant's hard drive might become a matter of court records once the discover subpoena is executed. It's a horrible privacy breach based on a supposition, and holding the account owner responsible is tantamount to a digital witch hunt.

I'm not too worried about it personally for two reasons. One is that I don't conduct any illegal activity and my WiFi is well-secured. Second is that, even if somebody wanted to take the time to hack my WiFi, there's a ton of WiFi's surrounding me which are lower security, including the apartment network (I pay for my internet, but I have "free" crappy internet as well. I have one router secured, and the apartment's crappy net is provided through an open router; they're backbone is through Charter, who as previously stated is not participating in Operation Big Brother)

"This system is not designed to produce lawsuits—it's designed to produce education."

Oh its gonna start lawsuits, just not from the ISP or fascists end.

Easy lawsuits would include suits under the 1st Amendment when they block you from any site that allows you to voice your political, religious, or artistic side.

Flip the Electronic Communications Privacy Act, California Comprehensive Computer Data Access and Fraud Act, Computer Fraud and Abuse Act back on these fascists and sue them to bankruptcy. This way we can make room for ISPs that simply provide internet service not get into bed with copyright plaintiffs.

I cannot wait for the first time I get an "education warning". I will be heading down to my federal courthouse and blast these ISP duches with a lawsuit to make history.

So basically the MPAA hates what technology has to offer in the 21st century. Their solution? Send people back to the 90's!This will only speed up the next step for the internet:The death of the ISP. ISPs have been very mediocre in keeping up with advancements in network speed when compared to any other information technology, I won't miss them one bit when something better comes along.

Good news... Dish and Google might be teaming up to provide internet. Lets hope more ISPs form that are not sucking copyright holders off.

This is what you get when you let "the market" work things out on anything more important than iPhones or canned tomatoes. Once real money and power is involved, the consumer is immediately marginalized and denuded of any influence.

++ This is my gripe about Obama being ok with the cable companies coming to a "free market solution". Obama was kind of stuck in a bad place, if he asked congress (good luck with GOP controlled congress passing ANYTHING Obama wanted before this election) to do something about it, he would be labeled a socialist or whatever. If he goes with the free market solution, he pisses us liberals off. Hopefully now that Obama won again, maybe we can get something going, if EFF and others stepped up to make this an issue. But I don't see it coming to that anytime soon because right now, we have nothing but monopolies in this country when it comes to internet access, PERIOD. With that not being addressed, we won't ever see real legislation to do something about this kind of shit.

I hate to burst your bubble but... Obama was the big force driving this "solution". Not only does he approve, but the white house brokered the deal. Don't believe me...

This wasn't a "Market based solution"! In fact most of the major isp's involved only came around to this idea when the White House got involved. With Obama's reelection there is zero chance that we will have a law passed that outlaws this stuff.

What you do in power has always mattered more to me than words. And this case it was a BIG black mark against Obama in my mind. Funny how you didn't hear about this before the election... Heck, your clearly a supporter and you didn't even know about his involvement.

In short, if you are an independent musician, artist, animator, filmmaker well hope it's a hobby. You won't be able to share it in any way, to make a music file that will play on anyone else's computer, phone, etc.

IMO "Stealing" if anything only acts as advertising to the media companies. They just fear people using modern tech to make their own music albums, to 'crowdfund' a movie that then goes gold because there's no team of "Investor reps" meddling and muddling and the original story gets told. This is to set up the first step to crush legal competition to preserve territory for those that make our lousy dumb boring "Mass media" so no one can shake them.

Sure, let them punish me based solely on accusations (not proof), without ever giving me a day in court. And making me pay to appeal: genius!Best of all, punish the account, not just the person who infringed.

You can expect along with the implementation of the 6-strike program, the modification of the user agreements from the ISPs requiring binding arbitration and forbidding you to participate in a class action lawsuit (you can still file an individual lawsuit presumably). In case you missed it, http://lawprofessors.typepad.com/bankin ... tions.html. Then the circle is complete, if you don't like the $35 fee to contest an erroneous accusation or to get your service turned back on, you have to use binding arbitration (using an arbiter paid for by the company you are trying to arbitrate against (good luck)).

MAKE NO MISTAKE. This has nothing to do with Verizon or Time Warner caring about copyright, or "educating" anyone. This is about lining pockets. Notice that the "appeal period" suspends the redirecting to their "you've been bad" site in exchange for a fee. That's what they really want. They know statistically, there will be thousands of people who inadvertently or intentionally break these rules, they don't care which, and will pay the fee to get service back during the "appeal".

According to the article, the $35 fee is for an independent arbitrator, and thus the fee most likely goes to the arbitrator for their time.

MAKE NO MISTAKE. This has nothing to do with Verizon or Time Warner caring about copyright, or "educating" anyone. This is about lining pockets. Notice that the "appeal period" suspends the redirecting to their "you've been bad" site in exchange for a fee. That's what they really want. They know statistically, there will be thousands of people who inadvertently or intentionally break these rules, they don't care which, and will pay the fee to get service back during the "appeal".

According to the article, the $35 fee is for an independent arbitrator, and thus the fee most likely goes to the arbitrator for their time.

Except that in common practice, the arbitrator is "independent" but working for an arbitration company contracted by the ISP (or other large company using binding arbitration). So the arbitrators tend to heavily side with the corporation over the individual.

Until Congress modifies or eliminates the Federal Arbitration Act (which the US Supreme Court used for its basis in approving binding arbitration agreements that bar joining cases for class action status), we're likely going to see a huge increase in the use of binding arbitration which most often favors the corporation over the individual.

In addition, this completely turns US law on its head - it is guilty until proven innocent (and proving yourself innocent of something is much harder than proving someone guilty of something (proving a negative can be all but impossible)).

MAKE NO MISTAKE. This has nothing to do with Verizon or Time Warner caring about copyright, or "educating" anyone. This is about lining pockets. Notice that the "appeal period" suspends the redirecting to their "you've been bad" site in exchange for a fee. That's what they really want. They know statistically, there will be thousands of people who inadvertently or intentionally break these rules, they don't care which, and will pay the fee to get service back during the "appeal".

According to the article, the $35 fee is for an independent arbitrator, and thus the fee most likely goes to the arbitrator for their time.

Except that in common practice, the arbitrator is "independent" but working for an arbitration company contracted by the ISP (or other large company using binding arbitration). So the arbitrators tend to heavily side with the corporation over the individual.

Until Congress modifies or eliminates the Federal Arbitration Act (which the US Supreme Court used for its basis in approving binding arbitration agreements that bar joining cases for class action status), we're likely going to see a huge increase in the use of binding arbitration which most often favors the corporation over the individual.

In addition, this completely turns US law on its head - it is guilty until proven innocent (and proving yourself innocent of something is much harder than proving someone guilty of something (proving a negative can be all but impossible)).

Had you looked at the text I quoted you would have seen I was replying to someone who assumed the $35 arbitration fee would be "lining the pockets" of ISPs. I fully expect the "independent" arbitrators to be biased.

How much business will ISPs get from customers in fear of potential "education"?

Just how far will right way / wrong way "education" get in its efforts to stifle "bad" useand encourage "good" use of the internet?

Who will ultimately decide what the internet is to be used for, how it is used?

Isn't this a little (or a LOT) like the cd / mp3, dvd / piracy war revisited?

What good exactly will MORE bandwidth be, if it is throttled, targeted, channeled, collected,analyzed, mined, picked apart with a fine tooth comb, hands slapped, and led by the noseto "approved" locations and purposes?

Seems freedom is at odds with capitalism.

And currently capitalism is winning.

"I should be able to go wherever I want and do whatever I want." is at odds with "not at my expense"

And in between is "what constitutes a fair price" and who decides?

Apparently there's a lot of pickiness to be had when more (however it is, has yet to be defined) is expected, demanded, at a reasonable, minimal, non-existent cost.

I would like some more information on this. Visiting a page that has copyright infringements is now a "notice?" Youtube often has copyright infringements, as does twitter, do those count? What about torrent sites that also host legal torrents, are those marked as infringing?

Edit: Typos!

The wording of this worries me. It sounds like they're sending notices after just visiting a website, and not necessarily actually downloading anything. Thepiratebay does have some non-infringing material on it, same for rapidshare or other similar sites. The first strike shouldn't be letting us know we were on a site that has infringing material, it should be alerting us that we were actually downloading something.

So, we the users defeated SOPA/PIPA by getting on our elected officials' case about it and now almost a year later, our ISPs are pulling practically the same crap. However, because they are private companies and not government entities, it seems there is nothing we can do. Even a boycott won't work because almost all the major ISPs are participating.

I wonder how much Hollywood lined the ISPs pockets to get them to disregard the will of their bill-paying customers and institute this witch hunt for so-called "infringers".

"They'll have the right to appeal the case, which will be handled by an **independent arbitration firm**, he said. (The user will have to pay a $35 filing fee for the appeal)."

Does this basically mean Verizon can charge you $35 dollars whenever they want? I mean, this can be reduced down to "Oh hey, you listened to a song on Youtube. Give us $35 dollars or your internet will be slow as balls".